Evolution

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How the Animals Learned to Count

July 6, 2009

Any evolutionary article that begins with “How…” should be checked for Kipling-style just-so storytelling. Characteristics to watch for include (1) fanciful speculation without evidence: i.e., “made-up” tales that provide an answer to a childish question without appeal to rigorous proof, and (2) statements made with dogmatic authority, like a parent would explain to a child […]

Mammals

Animals Are Not Malthusians

July 2, 2009

According to Malthus and Darwin, the struggle to survive favors those who have the most fitness to take advantage of limited resources. A study by the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Vienna, reported by PhysOrg shows this is not the case: Charles Darwin and his contemporaries postulated that food consumption in birds and mammals […]

Fossils

The Elephant Explosion

June 30, 2009

The title is not intended to suggest pieces of pachyderm flying all over the place, but rather one paleontologist’s theory about the rapid pace of elephant evolution 60 million years ago. He bases his ideas on a small fossil he found in Morocco. According to him, the primitive ancestor of all elephants (order Proboscidea) lived […]

Birds

Dino Fossils Generate Overblown Claims

June 18, 2009

04/10/2006), inventing feathers out of thin air. This time, it was justified on the basis of a new paper in Nature that claims to remove an obstacle in the dinosaur-bird evolution story.1 Doubters had pointed to differences in the three forward-pointing toes. With dinosaurs, it was toes 1, 2 and 3 that were retained; while […]

Amazing Facts

Plants Use the Perfect Propeller

June 16, 2009

What kid hasn’t played with maple seeds to watch them spin in the air like helicopters? Scientists watch them, too. A team from the Netherlands and California found out how they stay in the air for so long without engines to drive them. One would think in an era of advanced aeronautical engineering the physics […]

Birds

Birds Didnt Evolve from Dinosaurs

June 9, 2009

June 9, 2009 — “The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.” That statement is not being made by creationists, but by science reporters describing work at Oregon State University that cast new doubt on the idea that […]

Bible and Theology

Is Theistic Evolution Intelligently Designed?

May 29, 2009

A battle of websites is rising, and New Scientist is gloating. Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and a candidate to lead the National Institutes of Health) has launched a website promoting theistic evolution called Biologos.org. The intelligent-design think tank Discovery Institute has offered a counter-site called FaithAndEvolution.org. Amanda Gefter […]

Early Man

Hominids, Homonyms, and Homo sapiens

May 27, 2009

How’s the story of human evolution hanging together these days? There’s no better place to look than the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In the yearly issue released this month, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz gave a pretty thorough overview of the “Evolution of the Genus Homo.”1 Their account is fraught with controversy, […]

Dumb Ideas

Junk-DNA Stock Tumbles

May 18, 2009

Those investing credibility in the concept of “junk DNA” suffered more losses this week. Repeated hits to the paradigm that portions of non-coding DNA are useless leftovers of evolution make a recovery unlikely. In Science,1 researchers from Princeton and Indiana University reported a function for transposons and the genes that act on them, […]

Dumb Ideas

Survival of the Slowest

May 11, 2009

Without stopping to think, the BBC News claimed that evolution is slowing snails down. “Natural selection is favouring snails with reduced metabolic rates, researchers in Chile have discovered.” Why would evolution do such a thing? Isn’t the proverbial slowest of beasts already at risk of predators? Not necessarily. Look on the positive side: “Snails with […]

Education

High School Biology Teachers Have Clout

May 8, 2009

Two professors at Minnesota State surveyed a thousand students on the impact of their high school biology teachers when it comes to the subject of evolution or creation: Students whose high school biology class included creationism (with or without evolution) were more likely to accept creationist views as entering college students. Similarly, students exposed to […]

Fossils

The Long Precambrian Fuse Gets Longer

April 28, 2009

Why did complex multicellular life explode on the scene some 550 million years ago? That’s mystery enough, but finding complex single-celled life a billion years earlier makes it worse. A new paper evaluated claims of Cambrian-like fossils from India dated 1.6 billion years old in the evolutionary timeline. It did not explain the Cambrian explosion, […]

Dinosaurs

How Valid Is Computerized Dinosaur Reconstruction?

April 18, 2009

Can you reconstruct a dinosaur on a computer? Of course you can. The question is how accurate it reflects something no one has ever seen. Live Science told about Peter Falkingham at the University of Manchester who is using “genetic algorithms” and simulating evolution to figure out how dinosaurs walked. A dinosaur’s gait […]

Cell Biology

Is Horizontal Gene Transfer a Force for Evolution?

April 13, 2009

Two more genomes were published last week: the information libraries of two tiny microbes. They are members of Micromonas, green algae less than two microns across. The original paper and summary both bragged about how the genetic information is helping shed light on evolution, but did the data really contain any light? If so, the […]

Biomimetics

Animal Flight Control: Wheres the Evolution?

April 12, 2009

A couple of articles in Science last week discussed the marvels of flight control in birds. “Being earthbound save for the ability to fly airplanes and helicopters, humans stand in awe of animals that power their own movement through the air by flapping their wings, and of the spectacular maneuvers that some of these animals […]

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